~ Cooking with Alyce Morgan

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Favorite Quotes–Old and New

LOVE AFTER LOVE

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

∼Derek Walcott

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We are all equal in the eyes of the stove. -Jacques Pépin

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…Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

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“Wine is God’s special drink. The purpose of good wine is to inspire us to a livelier sense of gratitude to God.”
– John Calvin

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YOUR TRUE HOME

Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas a Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.

John O’Donohue
Excerpt from ETERNAL ECHOES

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So here’s Alyce’s addition to the Pope Francis’ quote:

~~YOU PRAY FOR THE HUNGRY. THEN YOU PRAY TO KNOW HOW TO FEED THEM. THEN YOU FEED THEM. THAT’S HOW PRAYER WORKS. ~Pope Francis and Alyce Morgan

Let us not take this food too seriously. It’s just food. It’s not nuclear physics. It’s not medical research. It’s eating, and it should be fun, and it’s all about having a good time with people you care about. And the tone wasn’t terribly serious, which was intentional. Some people in the food world thought we weren’t serious people. But we were. We took it all seriously enough, you know. We were also just fun-loving girls.

~~Julee Rosso (about the start of the SILVER PALATE cookbook)

The world is a crazy place. Cook for someone soon. Light the candles. Breathe. Everyone’s fed.

~Alyce Morgan

I hope I can live long enough to cook all the recipes I’ve printed and to drink the wine I’ve cellared. Amen.

~Alyce Morgan

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Don’t count the days – make the days count.” Muhammad Ali

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Among virtually every culture on Earth, anything worth doing is best done over dinner. Bring out a nicely braised roast, a hot loaf of bread, and a slice of lemon pie, and rifts can be healed, pacts sealed, loves revealed. Even the condemned do not want to leave the world without one last supper. –Natalie Angier —New York Times, November, 2000.

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“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.” ~ John Muir

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“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning my day difficult.”E.B. White

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“We sing because we can.” –John Bell

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Quote of the Day: Vocation

IT COMES FROM the Latin vocare, to call, and means the work a man is called to by God. There are all different kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Super-ego, or Self-interest. By and large a good rule for finding out is this. The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing TV deodorant commercials, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a) but probably aren’t helping your patients much either.

Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.

“A fruit is a vegetable with looks and money. Plus, if you let fruit rot, it turns into wine, something Brussels sprouts never do.”-PJ O’Rourke.

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“Where there is cake, there is hope. And there is always cake.” – Dean Koontz

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“Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.”– Arthur Rimbaud.

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When people were hungry, Jesus didn’t say, ‘Now, is that political or social?’ He said, ‘I feed you.’ Because the good news to a hungry person is bread.” –Desmond Tutu

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“People who love to eat are always the BEST people.”Julia Child.

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“I thought such awful thoughts that I cannot even say them out loud, because they would make Jesus want to drink gin straight out of the cat dish.” –Anne Lamott.

It seems that all my bridges have been burnt But you say that’s exactly how this grace thing works. It’s not the long walk home that will change this heart But the welcome I receive with every start – Roll Away Your Stone, Mumford & Sons

Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant. —Robert Louis Stevenson

**If we have no peace, it’s because we have forgotten that we belong to one another. –Mother Teresa

**The duty of privilege is absolute integrity. — John O’Donohue

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Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. – Lewis Carroll, ALICE IN WONDERLAND

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Psalm 96:1 : Oh sing to the Lord a new song.

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“I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are and does not leave us where it found us.” Anne Lamott

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The love that we have always known, our constant joy and endless light, now to the loveless world be shown, now break upon its deadly night. Into one song compress the love that rules our universe above: sing love; sing love; sing God is love! (Jaroslav Varda, 1979)

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“Alas for those who never sing and die with all their music left in them.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, 19th century

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Most people are about as happy as they make their minds up to be.

–Abraham Lincoln

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“There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger’s origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.” ― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” ― Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine

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Patience is choosing to control your emotions rather than letting your emotions control you. -Mark Merrill

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“If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.

A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world so that you can do what others claim cannot be done to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.
– A Franciscan benediction

Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the ‘Titanic’ who waved off the dessert cart. ~ Erma Bombeck

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“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.” ~Jamie Tworkowski

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“And if you can’t get butter infused with the tears of Dutch milkmaids, store-bought is fine.” ~Ina Garten (?)